The doorman must have been watching. As soon as Sean’s Lincoln glided into the no-standing zone in front of my building, Morris ran out holding a big black umbrella. I kissed Sean’s cheek and stepped into a cold, driving rain. The weather had done what nothing else could have: cleared away the reporters and gawkers. “Some night,” the doorman said as we hurried into the lobby. He summoned the elevator and lingered by my side. “Just wanted to say, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss. Mrs. Hamish was a real nice lady.”
“Thanks, Morris.” I smiled up at his grizzled, bulldog face. Morris was the oldest of our doormen, semiretired, working just a few weekend shifts.
“You expecting more visitors tonight?”
“Maybe, though in this weather . . . Morris, you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
“Sure have. Thirty-five years in this building, longer than I been married. When I die, they gonna bury me in the lobby.”
“Do you happen to remember who was living in Mr. Donovan’s apartment before we married?”
“Ma’am?” he said, stalling. I could see the wariness in his eyes. Doormen have their codes of conduct, as all professions do, and discretion had to be a large part of theirs. No one likes a gossipy doorman; they see too much.
“Was there a woman living there? With a child, maybe?”
“Oh, jeez,” he said. “That was a long time ago.” I waited. “I think maybe he had a housekeeper for a while. And the housekeeper had a little one.”
Of course, I thought. A maid, not a lover. Suddenly it all made sense. “What was her name?”
“Oh, you got me there, Mrs. Donovan.”
“And the child? Was it a boy or a girl?”
He squinted into middle distance. “A little boy, I think. No, a girl, definitely a girl. Or was it a boy?” The elevator arrived while he was still debating with himself, and I rode up alone. It was satisfying to have one small puzzle resolved, but less than it should have been without Molly to enlighten. For me that was the hardest part of her death to absorb, even more than its brutality: the suddenness, which left me choking on all the things I should have said.
I’d thought we had time.
• • •
Though shiva had resumed at sunset, the weather had kept everyone away except Max, who’d brought the baby, and my faithful staff. I found it hard to look at Harriet after hearing Rosenbaum’s insinuations. I knew they were false; I knew the police had tried to pin the murders on me, too. And yet they’d sullied her in my mind, and left me feeling angry without knowing why.
Maybe that’s why I reacted the way I did to her remark. She wasn’t the first. Others had voiced similar idiocies in my hearing and I’d merely tightened my lips and turned away. But Harriet should have known better.
Someone had lit a fire in the living room, and we gathered around it, drinking mulled whiskey that Chloe, who’d spent a gap year tending bar in Dublin, had prepared for everyone. The absence of outsiders was a relief. I slipped off my boots and curled up on one of the sofas, while Mingus stretched out on the floor beside me. Jean-Paul asked what the police said, and everyone turned to me.
“They’re clueless,” I said. “They’re chasing their tails.”
“You don’t know that,” Max said. He was feeding the baby, who kept falling asleep on the bottle and then jerking awake to suck vigorously for a moment or two before dozing off again. “They’re not going to tell you what they know.”
“They asked all the wrong questions.”
“The lead guy, Rosenbaum, is no slouch. I asked around. He was an NYPD homicide detective before he moved to Westchester.”
Lorna said, “I heard once on TV that if the cops don’t solve a murder within forty-eight hours, chances are they never will.”
My heart sank, for she’d touched on my greatest fear. As long as the killer was free, I was in limbo.
“Thanks, Lorna,” Jean-Paul said. “That’s real helpful.”
She lowered her eyes. “Sorry.”
“Of course they’ll catch him,” Harriet said in her brisk, English nanny tone. “Molly and Rowena were not some inner-city riffraff killed in a drive-by. They mattered.”
In the silence that followed this remark, Chloe and Jean-Paul exchanged glances, and Max raised an eyebrow. I knew then that if I quit the agency, Max would, too. Without me, and without the income generated by Max’s and Rowena’s books, the spoils would be meager indeed. Harriet could lose other clients, too. Some writers would be too afraid of losing representation to jump ship, but the most successful ones knew they had choices. An agency is a nebulous thing, constructed of relationships. Harriet might inherit the kingdom only to find it a ghost town.
“The important thing,” she continued, “is to keep a positive outlook and take comfort where we can.”
“What comfort is that?” I asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but she answered it. “Well, I for one find some in knowing that even though the end was sudden, it was relatively painless, and Molly was spared the suffering we all knew was coming.”
Her words shot through me like a bolt. I sat up, glaring. “How can you say that? Are you really that stupid?”
Instead of getting angry, she shrank back in her chair. “Jo, please! All I meant is that I’ve seen people die of cancer, and it’s a terrible way to go.”
“So it was a mercy killing. Maybe we should find this monster and thank him, what do you think?”
A chorus of protests broke out. “Easy, Jo . . . Harriet didn’t mean . . . no one’s suggesting . . .” Only Lorna was silent, looking wide-eyed from Harriet to me like a child watching her parents quarrel.
I had the feeling, so familiar of late, of a breached levee within me. Words gushed out of my mouth, as unstoppable as the stream in Leigh’s painting. “Molly could have ended it herself if she’d chosen to. She had the knowledge and the means. That’s not what she wanted. She told me she meant to squeeze every last drop of juice out of her life. She wanted to revisit places she’d loved. She wanted to see her garden bloom and her writers prosper. She wanted one more Shakespeare in the Park. She wanted to see this little baby walk, and maybe she could have. She wanted to spend time with the people she loved. And it was her time to spend. Every day was precious, more precious than a hundred of ours, because she had so few left. That’s what this murdering bastard stole from her. And for this you are thankful!”
Harriet was hunched over in her chair. One hand covered her eyes, and her spiky gray head bobbed with muted sobs. I came back to myself feeling as if I’d stabbed her with a knife.
“I’m sorry, Harriet, I’m so sorry!” I rushed over and tried to embrace her, but she pulled away. Then I fled, like the coward I was, down the hall to my bedroom with the dog at my heels. I slammed the door and threw myself onto the bed. Mingus nudged me with his muzzle, his brow contracted in a very human expression of worry. “I’m fine,” I said automatically, then groaned with despair: now I was lying even to the dog.
A knock came at the door. I ignored it. The door opened, and Max walked in with Molly on his shoulder. He sat beside me on the edge of the bed and shifted her to his lap. When Mingus came over to investigate, the baby gazed back at him with huge eyes and a wide-open mouth. I stroked her fine black hair, soft as dandelion wisps, and felt the steady pulse beneath the fontanel.
“How are you?” Max said. “And if you say ‘fine’ again, I’m going to smack you.”
“Is Harriet all right?”
“Who cares?”
“I was awful to her.”
“Yes. It was quite a relief.”
I sat up. “My losing it is a relief?”
“You acting human is. I was starting to wonder.”
“But Harriet of all people. She’s been solid, Max.”
“It was a moronic thing to say. One of a series from her.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” he said, “it’s not. The point is, you’re a Spartan. I know exactly what Molly meant to you, yet all week long I’ve watched you stonewall your grief. It’s admirable as hell; you broke my fucking heart at the funeral. But my God, woman, don’t you know you’re allowed to cry? It’s the one privilege your sex is allowed; you ought to take it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m afraid to. Once I started, how would I stop?”
“It sort of stops by itself. And you can. In fact,” he said, handing me the diaper from his shoulder, “you’re crying now.”
He held me tight as the last levee collapsed, and murmured in my ear. “It’s OK, let it come. When it’s over, you’ll still be here.”
“And Molly still won’t,” I gasped.
“And Molly still won’t.”
What happens, I discovered, is that you run out of tears. Afterward, my nose was stuffed, but my spirit felt less congested. The body, it seemed, had its own mourning to do.
Max let go and studied my face. “Better?”
“If you think one good cry will wash away all my sorrows, you’ve been drinking the water at Disney, my friend.”
“Now, that’s the Jo we all know and fear! And a good thing, too, because you look like hell. Who’d have guessed you were the type to get all bloodshot and blotchy when you cry?”
“Everyone does,” I said, wiping my face with the diaper.
“Nonsense. Your average romantic heroine turns dewy and ethereal when she weeps. I learned this from Rowena.”
I laughed—couldn’t help it. “What am I going to do, Max?”
“What everyone does when they’ve lost someone. Go on with your life and fake it till the feeling comes back.”
The baby had fallen asleep with her fist in her mouth. Max laid her down between us. She had tiny, perfect hands, translucent fingernails the size of diamond chips. I stroked the palm of one hand, and it closed around my finger. I felt a tug inside me.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “Molly is dead; long live Molly?”
“What else is there?” Max said.
• • •
On Monday I went back to work. Max flew home with Barry and the baby, but only after coming into the office to meet with building security. We were once again on full alert. Visitors would be screened twice, downstairs by security and upstairs by Lorna. Our doors were to be kept locked, our phones were tapped, and the police were on speed-dial. Mingus would accompany me to and from work, and Jean-Paul would escort me anywhere the dog couldn’t. All these precautions created a siege-like atmosphere in the office. But even within the gates, all was not well. Harriet greeted my arrival with a cool stare. “You’re back, then,” she said.
Clearly I was not forgiven.
“Of course,” I said, as if I hadn’t spent most of the night wavering back and forth. By forging on, I was endangering the people I cared for. But the best way of protecting us all was to catch Sam Spade, and the best way to do that was to put myself out there as bait. I had to go back.
But no sooner did I make that decision than I began to second-guess it. What if he didn’t come for me? What if, instead, I got a call one day informing me that Jean-Paul or Chloe or another of my writers had been murdered? How would I live with that?
I didn’t know what was best, and with Molly gone, there was no one to ask. In the end, my choice was a selfish one. I would go on because I wanted to go on. Molly’s last words were etched in my heart. You’re not who you are because Hugo married you. He married you because of who you are. For the first time in my life, faced with the loss of the agency, I acknowledged the truth in that. Hugo was a genius and I am far from that, but I had been as good for him as he had been for me. When I read his drafts, I saw not only what the story was, but also what it wanted to become. The first time we met, Hugo and I didn’t bond over sex and a shared predilection for May-December romance, as everyone assumed. Our first night together was spent chastely talking about his work. I’d read all of his published books, most of them more than once, and I’d read the new manuscript on the train from New York. Of all living writers, Hugo was the one I admired most. Did I, as Molly claimed, purposely misunderstand her instructions in order to engineer a meeting? If I did, I have no memory of it; but I wouldn’t put it past the starstruck little bookworm I was back then. I’d loved Hugo’s stories before I loved him, and he’d loved my understanding of them before he ever thought of loving me. Perhaps it was always what he loved best.
I marched past Harriet to my office and sat at the desk I’d inherited from Molly; and from somewhere deep inside my head, I heard the echo of her voice. Once more unto the breach, kiddo.
There was a ton of work to catch up on, starting with several hundred e-mails. I worked my way steadily through them, deleting the ones from reporters, delegating others to Jean-Paul and Lorna. Two hours later, I was down to a few dozen that needed a personal response when Harriet walked into my office without knocking. “We need to talk.”
Never a harbinger of good news, that phrase. I waved her to a chair and waited with what I would call a sense of impending disaster, if that were not now my normal state. Harriet lowered herself stiffly into the chair. She did not look good. Her face was pale, with red splotches on her cheeks, and her gray hair was in a state of anarchy. She looked like I felt, which was where we differed.
“I need to know where I stand,” she blurted.
“Where you’ve always stood,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”
“That’s not good enough. I’ve been with this agency for longer than you have. It’s time I became a partner.”
It was out now, the five-hundred-pound gorilla crouching between us, and I hadn’t so much as a banana to feed it.
“Harriet,” I said, “I’m incredibly grateful for everything you’ve done, not only this past week, but in all the time you’ve been here. I understand your feelings, and I’m willing to discuss your future here, but frankly, your timing amazes me. You must understand that I’m in no shape to make major decisions right now.”
“No—you must understand that I can’t go on waiting and hoping for you to do the right thing. I know this is a bad time; it’s a bad time for me, too, in case you haven’t noticed. But this should be a no-brainer. I’ve earned this. I deserve it.”
She had a point. She’d paid her dues and then some. But a partnership is a bond almost as profound as marriage, and as I looked at Harriet’s haughty, pinched mouth and censorious eyes, I felt the dawning of something like dread. It was one thing to work with her, but the agency would be different with Harriet as a partner, and not, I feared, in a good way.
And yet I didn’t want her to leave, either. Prickly though she was, I respected both her taste and her toughness. Her clients were a reliable bunch who brought in a steady stream of revenue and added heft to the agency. If she left, she would take them with her; I could not and would not do to her what I’d done to Charlie. If it was simply a matter of money, if she wanted a larger share of the pie, I could accommodate her. But how could I submit to a shotgun wedding?
I told her I needed time to think. Harriet didn’t soften at all, which, under different circumstances, was one of the things I liked about her.
“Think fast, then, because I do have other options. I love this agency and it would break my heart to leave it. But I won’t go on as before.”
I wondered then if she knew about Molly’s bequest. “If you’re thinking of going solo, that’s your right, of course. But I’m sure we can come up with a less risky solution.”
“That is not my only option,” she said testily.
Mingus didn’t like her tone. He sat up and gave her a hard stare, which she ignored. I nudged him with my foot and motioned him down. The trouble with a German shepherd for an ally is that you can’t actually deploy him. What was Harriet talking about? Where would she go if she left me? She wouldn’t leave just to go work for another agent; someone must have offered her a partnership, but who? No sooner did I ask the question than the answer came to me. I gasped. “Not Charlie Malvino!”
“Never you mind,” Harriet said, but a blush broke through her pale skin and I knew I was right.
“No, really, Harriet? How could—I mean, the two of you are so different.”
“You and I are different; that never stopped us working together.”
“Yes, but you and Charlie are at opposite ends of the spectrum.”
“Which some people might say makes us perfect for each other.”
“Some people meaning Charlie?” It explained so much: their lunch, her indignation on his behalf, even the whispering at Molly’s funeral. And yet I could hardly wrap my mind around it. When they were both on the agency staff, they used to squabble incessantly in staff meetings. Harriet was nearly twenty years older and far more experienced, but Charlie, always a cheeky devil, had no respect. He used to imitate her accent and manner right to her face. “Queen Harriet,” he’d called her, and “Your Ladyship.” If Charlie was courting her now, it could only be to hurt me.
I looked closely at Harriet, who now wore a smug, secretive little smile, and a dark thought struck me. Could Charlie have gone so far in his malice as to actually seduce her? I tried to banish that thought to the pit from which it had escaped, but it left its traces, which mingled with those left by Lieutenant Rosenbaum into a noxious brew.
“Class and crass, he calls it,” Harriet said, dropping all pretense now. “I’m the class, he’s the crass. We balance each other out.”
“Or cancel each other out. Harriet, be careful.”
“You be careful.” It sounded like a threat. We stared at each other. The room was so quiet I could hear Mingus breathing.
Harriet composed her features. “I meant you should consider the matter carefully. I belong here. We both do. But things have to change.”
I thought about that, disliking both my options. Losing Harriet now would leave a big hole in the agency. I’d never replaced Charlie; so I’d have to find another agent or two. Jean-Paul was too green for promotion, and Lorna wasn’t agent material. Chloe was, but she was Harriet’s assistant and would probably go with her. I’d lose all those clients, too.
Maybe I could I live with Harriet as a partner, I thought. Would it really be so different from the way things were presently? Maybe if she got what she’d wanted for so long, she’d be less abrasive. Still, something in me recoiled from the thought of giving in to her. Why now of all times? Was Charlie pressuring her, or had Harriet herself decided to strike when I was most vulnerable? I wished I could talk it over with Molly.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
The door had barely closed behind her when Lorna staggered in under the weight of an enormous vase of lilies. She set it down on my desk.
“What’s this?” I said.
“No idea. There’s a card.”
I opened the card.
Dear Jo,
My deepest sympathies for your loss.
Your devoted, Sam Spade